The Second Coming

I’ll see you tomorrow. You deliver Mr. Arnold because Marion would want that and I’ll try to deliver Leslie because that’s what you want.”
    â€œYou got yourself a deal.”
    When he moved his thigh and picked up the Luger between his legs, the metal felt hotter than his own body.
    The glass doors of St. Mark’s closed behind the chaplain. Closing the door for the last time. That was it. That’s why everything looked so clear. He knew he would not come here again. When you leave a house for the last time and take one last look around before closing the door, it is as if you were seeing the house again for the first time. What happened to the five thousand times between?
    2
    He had not known who the girl in the greenhouse was until Kitty told him twice, once before the girl ran away from the sanatorium and again afterwards. But even when he found out and at the same time saw that Kitty did not know where her daughter was, he could not bring himself to pay close attention. Something else engaged him even as Kitty and her grinning dentist husband and grinning Jimmy Rogers pressed in upon him. They wanted something from him. It was clear but not from what they said. They were telling jokes and saying something about property, Arabs, money, state laws about guardianship and inheritance, developing an island. An island? Though he was not listening closely, there was the unmistakable feeling in the back of the neck when someone wants something and is casting about for a way to ask. Not finding a way, they move closer, heads weaving like a boxer’s, looking for an opening.
    What did they want? Money? Free legal advice? Both? It seemed to be Kitty who wanted it most. At least she came closest, touched, hugged, kissed, poked, jostled, swayed against, jangled, shimmered.
    What did she want?
    Though he faced the husband, now not three feet away, it was hard to take in more than the grin, white teeth, styled hair, pink clothes.
    Instead he gazed past them, past the white wicker and stuffed linen furniture, the lacquered ivory-colored tables, blue porcelain lamps—it was Marion’s Chinese Export blue-and-white room, what in the South used to be called a sun parlor—to Leslie and the Cupps and Jack Curl, past Lewis Peckham the golf pro listening politely to Bertie, Bertie making grips on an invisible golf club; past the others, guests and waiters, past the huge Louis XV secretary with its doors open to show the decoupage panels, to the bank of windows broad as a ship’s bridge opening onto a short steep yard dropping off to the gorge and the valley beyond.
    A gazebo perched on the lip of the gorge.
    A twist of cloud, thick as cotton, rose from the gorge behind the gazebo and a small scarlet oak he had never noticed before. It was stunted and lopsided and black. The few leaves that hadn’t fallen hung straight down as if they had been tied on by a child. The white gazebo was almost whited out by the cloud.
    From beyond the post oak in the silent swamp came the geclick of the Greener breech being broken and presently the gecluck of its closing.
    That was when you reloaded.
    But you had only shot once, at the first single. You had another shell. Why not wait until the second shot at the second single to reload?
    Because you knew you only needed three shots, two for the quail and one for you.
    Wait a minute. There were four empty Winchester Super-X shells afterwards, three on the quilt beside him in the Negro cabin where he was lying after the woman wiped the blood from his face, and a fourth in the Greener the guide had brought back with the shells. The cabin smelled of kerosene and flour paste. Newspapers were freshly pasted on the walls.
    But there were only three shots.
    Wait a minute. Is it possible to fire both barrels of the Greener at once? There were two triggers.
    â€œWait a minute,” he said aloud. Then he smiled and shrugged. What difference did it make?
    The three Arabs were pressing in upon him. That’s what they looked like, Arabs: the dentist, Jimmy Rogers, and Bertie: brown-skinned, coming too close, smiling, nodding—Jimmy Rogers was even rubbing his hands together.
    â€œExcuse me,” he said. “I have to go upstairs and tend to some business.”
    â€œWhat business?” asked Kitty, frowning.
    Her closeness and nosiness gave him a shower of goose-bumps, a peculiar but not unpleasant sensation.
    â€œI’m looking for an old